Cover story: a year of beautiful books

This year for the first time more ebooks were sold than hardbacks. Publishers have responded by bringing out exquisite new releases and revamps of classics
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It is not just jacket design that has upped its game in recent years… Victorian letterpress blocks. Photograph: Alamy/Steven Heald

In his recent Booker acceptance speech, Julian Barnes did the usual polite thing of thanking his editors and his agent. But then, just when everyone thought he was done, he veered off in an entirely unexpected direction to pay animated tribute to Suzanne Dean, "the best book designer in town", who had turned his prize-winning novel into "a beautiful object". The Sense of an Ending does indeed come clad in a lovely cover, an elegiac visual riff on dandelion clocks, which darkens at the edge to black, an idea of mourning that then runs over the edges of the pages themselves. At least it does in the early editions. Such little touches are both fiddly and expensive (which comes to the same thing) so subsequent reprintings have left off the darkened page ends. It's a decision, Dean herself admits, that is going to make the first editions of the novel just that little bit more desirable in years to come.

Whatever might be thought of Barnes's novel, there was wide agreement that his public acknowledgment of the book's designer was a "moment", one that needed to be parsed for its implications. And chief among those implications seems to be that judging a book (at least partly) by its cover has become a legitimate thing to do. In addition to Dean at Random House, there is currently a whole slew of art editors, production directors and book designers who are going about their business with a new spring in their step. Nothing raises the spirits more than knowing that people are noticing your work, think it good, and want you to do more.

Publishers have started building their marketing strategies around form rather than content. The Everyman Library, which is coming up to the 20th anniversary of its modern relaunch, makes much of its books' elegant two-colour case stamping, silk ribbon markers and "European-style" half-round spines. In 2009, to celebrate its 80th birthday, Faber republished a collection of its classic poetry hardbacks illustrated with exquisite wood and lino cuts by contemporary artists. Not to be outdone, Penguin will next year be reissuing 100 classic novels in its revamped English Library series in what its press release describes as "readers' editions". What other sort could there be, you might wonder? The press release elaborates that these will be "books you will want to collect and share, admire and hold; books that celebrate the pure pleasure of reading". Translated into the material realm, this means cover designs that pay their respects to the classic orange spine of the original Penguin English Library, but modify its iconic "grid" in order to luxuriate in whole-cover retro prints.

It is not just the big publishing conglomerates that are paying more attention to the way their products look. Several boutique outfits have recently been established dedicated explicitly to making beautiful books. Full Circle and Unbound are just two, founded by the veteran publishing stars Liz Calder and John Mitchinson respectively. In their new incarnations as producers of exquisitely crafted books, Calder and Mitchinson spend more time than they probably ever did when they were helping to run companies including Bloomsbury and Orion pondering such arcane matters as cloth-slip covers, numbered limited editions, artwork that really is art, and paper so creamy you long to lick it.

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

As this suggests, it is not simply jacket design that has upped its game in recent years. The best and boldest designers are intent on rebuilding the book from the inside out. There's Chip Kidd of Knopf in New York, for instance, whose response to Haruki Murakami's new novel 1Q84 was to construct a kind of double-layered architecture. To literalise the book's main theme, which concerns the play between two adjacent realities, Kidd made a semi-transparent wrapper that slightly distorts the image of the main character, which is printed directly on to the cloth cover beneath. The result is an unsettling sense that there are two people, similar but different, staring out at you.

UK publishers have likewise taken to playing with the book's form. Claire Tomalin's new biography of Dickens arrived this autumn with a gold-stamped ribbon wrapper around its middle, making it Christmas-ready before it had even left the shop. From Random House, courtesy of Suzanne Dean again, Erin Morgenstern's surreal debut, The Night Circus, was marketed as much around its lusciously gorgeous artwork (Dean had reworked the Barnesian black-edged pages motif) as it was around its Angela Carter-on-speed content. And let's not forget the way that Persephone Books has consistently made such elegant use of endpapers, that bit of the book so often regarded as dead space. Persephone, which reprints classic works by women, lines its inside covers with designs matched to each book's publication date. So Dorothy Whipple's High Wages comes wrapped in endpapers based on a dress fabric from 1930, while Maria Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery of 1816 is topped and tailed with a pattern drawn from a contemporary piece of block-printed cotton.

Molly Keane, Good Behaviour

Nor is this attention to detail simply a precious game played by publishing insiders to impress one another. Dean, whose career began unglamorously in product packaging, emphasises that the whole point of a good book design is to grab the attention of both the reader and bookseller, as "you have just a few seconds in which to make the sale". Donna Coonan at Virago, meanwhile, explains that she is more than happy if customers buy her books simply because they look nice. In 2008, to mark the 30th anniversary of Virago Modern Classics, the company reissued eight of its most celebrated texts in the newly designated "Designer Collection", jettisoning the company's dark green livery in favour of designs by contemporary stars including Cath Kidston and Barbara Hulanicki. The idea, Coonan says, was "to appeal to different audiences – not only those interested in books, but also in design, fashion and interiors". Gratifyingly the series has won approving nods from several style bibles: who needs the Bookseller when you've got Vogue, Elle Deco and Selvedge marking your card?

In his Booker speech, Barnes suggested that the reason the book's material presence matters so much right now is because of the challenge of e-readers, which tend to make all novels look alike. After three or four false starts, 2011 turned out to be the much-anticipated tipping point, when the Kindle, Sony reader and iPad no longer attracted suspicious stares when spotted out in public. By May this year both Amazon and Waterstones were reporting that ebooks now easily outsell hardbacks in the UK.

It may feel like Armageddon, but in fact we have been here before. In the mid-19th century, the shift from making paper out of expensive cloth to cheaper wood pulp unleashed a new era of mass-market publishing. Driven by growing literacy rates among the working class, the result was a flood of cheap identikit books, all flimsy paper and cardboard covers. The chattering classes looked on horrified, convinced that Literature – and the publishers and writers who depended on it for their livelihood – was doomed to extinction.

The first response was to try and turn the book back into a precious thing. Ruth Blacksell, who runs the prestigious MA in book design at Reading University, points to the way that William Morris's Kelmscott Press was born out of this desolation in the 1890s. By returning to artisanal methods of production, Morris hoped to revive a tradition of beautifully illustrated, handmade books, a philosophy that was taken into the 20th century by private presses such as the Nonesuch and the Golden Cockerel. Even Leonard and Virginia Woolf caught the bug when they bought a press in 1917 and set up shop from a spare room in their Richmond home. Their aim was twofold: to give Virginia a way of calming her jittery nerves (there was nothing so soothing, she said, as making sure your "h"s hadn't got mixed up with your "n"s) and to ensure that the Bloomsbury circle could publish work that, in Leonard's words, "the commercial publisher would not look at". One of the most significant productions to emerge from the Hogarth Press was TS Eliot's The Waste Land.

It is surely no coincidence that it is to this period, the age of the private presses, that so much of the current renaissance in book design refers. The Designer Collection at Virago Modern Classics, the new Penguin English Library and Persephone's much-admired endpapers all quote, to various degrees, the aesthetics of the inter-war period. That doesn't mean, however, that there is any intention to return to those hand-made, home-spun days. None of the publishing professionals I spoke to really believed that their readers had somehow divided themselves into two distinct groups, those who use Kindles and those who spend their weekends on bookbinding courses. What the rise of electronic publishing has done, rather, is create a context in which the book's two distinct incarnations – as beautiful object and as a set of vaporous pixels - are linked not by "or" but "and".

This is certainly what they believe at the Folio Society. You might think that a company that has dedicated itself since 1947 to publishing exquisite editions of classic texts – everything from Beowulf to Elizabeth David's Italian Food – would be feeling glum about its chances in this new landscape. But David Hayden, the publishing director and a bookselling veteran, is feeling perky. An unabashed fan of new technology, he reckons the result of the seismic shifts in publishing will mean "fewer and better-produced books". In particular he believes in the model of the "retroactive purchase", which goes something like this. You buy an e-reader and, at a stroke, have access to thousands of out-of-print classics via Project Gutenberg. One evening, at a loose end, you download The Mill on the Floss, having always wondered vaguely what it was about. You find yourself transfixed. You love this book, you really do, and want to suggest it to your book group. So you buy the Penguin Classic edition, because it's easy to scribble on and pass around. And then, when your Mum's birthday comes around – she loves George Eliot and has been on at you for ages to take the plunge – you give her a handsome presentation copy of the book, bound in buckram and silk, the sort of thing that the Folio Society does surpassingly well.

The problem with buckram and silk, though, not to mention embossed covers and card slip cases, is that they cost. Any publisher that insists on using the finest materials will simply not be able to afford to sell their products in the usual way, through a bricks-and-mortar bookshop. The only thing to do is develop an alternative business model. The Folio Society, for instance, has always operated a system whereby you become a "member" and buy a certain number of titles a year by mail order, although recently it has become possible to make one-off purchases too. Nicola Beauman, who founded Persephone Books in 1998, likewise explains that her paperbacks – their dove grey livery inspired by her love of vintage French stationery – would be prohibitively expensive if they were distributed via the high street. Instead she operates a highly successful mail order business via her website. Over the years she has built up a loyal clientele of more than 25,000 readers/customers who regularly send suggestions as to which inter-war classic she might next bring back into print.

Tibor Fischer, Crushed Mexican Spiders

Elsewhere you will find other innovative business models. The "Faber Finds" initiative, for instance, is a "print on demand" service that utilises digital technology to put vintage texts such as Margaret Drabble's biography of Angus Wilson or Jean Genet's The Maids quickly back in the hands of the reader. The single most striking new way of doing business, though, has to be that adopted by Unbound, the new press set up this summer by Mitchinson with two business partners. Unbound publishes books the way they used to be in the 18th century, by "subscription" or sponsorship. Instead of an advance paid by the publisher, the would-be author pitches her book-to-be on the company's website. If potential readers like the sound of it, they can pledge a certain amount of money and look forward to seeing their name listed when the book eventually appears: £10 gets you an electronic version, £20 buys you a hardback, £50 gives you a signed edition, and so on. Only once the required sum of money has been raised does the author set to work. The cash that Mitchinson and his partners save on the advance, advertising and distribution is diverted instead into producing an attractive book. Terry Jones is a convert to Unbound's way of doing business and recently brought out a collection of short stories under their colours. Tibor Fischer, meanwhile, has just released Crushed Mexican Spiders, which looks gorgeous, thanks to the slipcover, and the elegant endpapers and the thick creamy paper. What really stands out, though, is the fact that in the middle of the book there is an extended note about the typeface – Monotype Bembo Book. Unbound clearly assumes that its readers take a keen interest in such matters. Crushed Mexican Spiders is only 50 pages long, which makes the £10 hardback subscription a pricey one, though you also get an e-version for your iPad or Kindle. Mitchinson says bullishly: "people accept that if they want a beautiful book they're going to have to pay more." Substitute "organic meat" for "beautiful book" and you realise that you have heard this argument many times before.

One of the most striking features in this new wave of high-quality books produced by smaller presses is the renewed focus on illustrations. Pictures have been largely absent from the adult reading experience for the past 50 years, although this was hardly the case 50 years before that, when readers expected visual nudges as to what Scrooge saw when he was confronted by the Christmas ghosts or how Tom and Maggie clutched each other as they went down together at the end of The Mill on the Floss. However, when Calder and her partners set up Full Circle in 2008 – "just at the point when we were all wrestling with what digital would actually mean" – one of her founding principles was to make art work as important as text work. One of her business partners, the artist John Christie, had worked with Circle Press, the fine art press where it is not unusual for a limited edition to cost several thousand pounds. "At Full Circle," Calder explains, "we wanted to do something similar, though less expensive". The result is a series of intriguing matches between writers and artists. Rose Tremain's short story collection Wildtrack, for instance, is paired with abstract drawings by Jeff Fisher, the designer of the much-copied cover of Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

George Ewart Evans, Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay

Elsewhere at Full Circle, the illustrations are more obviously referential. David Gentleman, whose woodcuts contributed to Penguin's signature look in the 1950s, has produced elegant watercolours to accompany George Ewart Evans's classic text of rural life, Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay. Meanwhile, at Little Toller Books, classic texts of rural writing and illustration such as WH Hudson's A Shepherd's Life are brought back into beautiful existence with newly commissioned illustrations from contemporary artists. Either that, or the long-forgotten original artwork is reunited with the text. Nor is this just a question of beefing up old prose with some unfamiliar drawings and asking people to pay for it all over again (Ask the Fellows, for instance, has been in print at Faber ever since its first appearance in 1956). Frequently the addition of new artwork allows one to see familiar texts through fresh eyes. That certainly is the case at the Folio Society, where Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale have all recently been visually reimagined in ways that have surprised and delighted the authors.

Everyone agrees that Julian Barnes did a Good Thing back in October when he reminded everyone how important it is that books look good in this digital age. He may, though, have been speaking from a place that felt unnecessarily bleak. For the rise of the ebook has, paradoxically, made us more rather than less appreciative of its four-cornered cousin. Until just a few years ago you picked up a book without really thinking about it, but now it has become something to ponder. And that pondering – by readers, authors and publishers – seems already to be paying off. "When I go into a bookshop these days I'm struck by the fact that we are living in something of a golden age for book design," says Dean, whose elegant cover set the whole conversation running.

Still, as she would probably be the first to agree, beauty comes in many forms. Where a material book really scores is in the way it carries its own life – and that of its reader – with it. Scuffed corners, marginal notes, ice-cream dribbles and jotted telephone numbers may not exactly be smart, but they add a weight of meaning to a text that that the icy perfection of the Kindle or the iPad cannot bear. Americans have a word for such cherished if slightly battered objects – "pre-loved". And it is in the signs and stigmata of "pre-loving" – as well as in its spiffy cover and sewn-in silk bookmark – that the beauty of a book really resides.